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Breaking up with someone is pretty much the worst thing EVER. It’s one of those horrible tasks that you want to put off for the rest of your life, like doing your taxes or visiting your semi-comatose grandfather. Ultimately, though, you just gotta rip off the bandage…or, you know, pull the plug. It’s hardest when the dumpee is a nice person; by the end of most relationships, you almost wish that your significant other was a dick/bitch so you could righteously dump his/her ass and then maybe, righteously, set his/her car on fire. But when he or she is nice, it’s the hardest thing in the world because you’ll be hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it, even though it’s better in the long run (because it frees him/her up to find someone else who will probably hurt him/her. Ah, Love!). I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot recently, so here’s the first part in a several part series about ways one shouldn’t break up with someone. (Not that y’all need the advice; you’re all lovely people. I would love to be dumped by any one of you. It’s all for kicks and giggles.)
Inadvisable Method #1:
Through a Friend
Thinking about this takes me back to elementary/middle school. It’s the classic story: girl sees boy, girl develops obsessive giggly crush on boy, girl finally screws up courage after weeks of minutely dissected flirtation, girl writes boy a note in pink glittery pen, girl gives it to best friend, best friend gives it to boy’s friend, boy’s friend teases boy without mercy, boy checks the “no” box, boy dates girl’s best friend instead, everyone wears stirrup pants and vests…How awful. Of course, you can do it the other way around, too, and have you friend inform your significant other that he is “so, like, dumped.” One would imagine that this tactic is followed by the dividing up of assets like best spots on the playground and vacation cubby-space, but sadly enough, I would hear about this sort of thing in high school. I went to a huge high school, so it was inevitable to witness in the hallway at least one break-up a month, some of them through friends whose teachers were more lenient on the four-minutes-between-classes rule. Trust me, though, the break-ups were never as awkward as the, uh…shall we say “unions”…against the lockers.
More later, maybe.
I don’t know, maybe I’m too old and cranky for teen angst. I used to love it; I delighted in all the drama that my friends came up with and was thrilled when I had my own to bring to the table. Something about lonelygirl15 rubs me the wrong way, though. It might be her twitchy face and frequent use of fillers. “Um, I’m a lonely girl…I’m 16…but I don’t want, um, you to be all, um, stalky, so I won’t tell you where, um, I live, just say a million times that, um, it’s really boring. And make some more faces. Um.” Ugh. It could be that I’ve known about the series for a while, since right around the time it started getting big, before people were seriously questioning how real it was. I never watched it, as initial descriptions made it sound stupid and I had lost interest in the whole blogging thing after my own blogring had gotten too histrionic, even for my tastes. Plus, it got really outlandish, like the Internet version of “Passions”, another relic from my middle school days. When it was finally revealed to be a hoax, I wasn’t totally surprised, but I’ll admit to being disappointed. It’s sort of sad that this public diary, one that touched a lot of young people, was all written by adults with marketing on their minds. I guess this has a lot of implications: our manipulation by the media, the ease with which we can re-invent ourselves on the Internet, our voyeuristic interest in the personal lives of others/our solipsistic belief that people give a damn about the mundane happenings in our own lives, our need for a human connection in an increasingly remote and mechanical society. I don’t really want to talk about any of those, though; that’s fodder for a research paper that I am too lazy to do. Basically, I hate lonelygirl15 for being angsty in a way I like to think I’ve left behind; but I also hate her for abandoning it for some stupid occult theme. If someone is going to have access to the minds and emotions of thousands of people, there should be some honesty in there; teen bullshit is largely no more real than anything lonelygirl15 said, but at least it has belonged to everyone.
Eff the cold. I’ll take dark over cold any day. Right now my house is 65 degrees. I’m fairly certain that’s against the law; it’s probably in the Geneva Conventions. One would think that my parents would be more attentive to the needs of their favorite child, but this is a typical conversation with them around this time of year:
“::teeth chattering::”
“You’re so dramatic.”
“It’s coooooooold. And there are wolves after me…”
“Put on a sweater.”
“Turn up the heat!”
“Who’s paying the gas bill?”
“Who’s paying to have my nose amputated from frostbite?!”
“Why on Earth did you give yourself such a ghastly purple pedicure?”
“Those are my toes! Because it’s cold!”
“Put on some socks, idiot child.”
We compromise with an electric blanket that I wrap around myself, shroud-style, for the duration of winter. It means that I can’t get any farther than ten feet from a wall outlet, but that suits me fine. The bathroom is fifteen feet from the socket near my bed, so that leaves five feet to scurry across into the shower, where I promptly scald off the top layer of skin and create enough steam to set off the hallway’s fire alarm, before doing a mad dash back to my room to hibernate under the blanket till the next day. It’s a system.
It’s still jarring how quickly it gets dark. Class ends at three and my trek back to the dorm is made during sunset, the autumn kind with a distinct sweeping fullness. My building is on the lip of a basin that I half-expect to be filled with the light that’s gotten stuck in the leaves of surrounding trees and drizzled like syrup to the ground below. Usually, though, there are only the concrete walkways, bare except for the detritus of a college campus – a beer bottle, a sandwich wrapper, a pile of cigarette butts added to by a moody girl on a bench. I have learned to expect even less when I leave for work; night has ambushed the outside, unnoticed by me as I sit in front of my computer. It is not an upgrade to replace the glow of my laptop screen with the brash effulgence of streetlamps. I close my eyes for the walk, a straight line from point A to point B, the path of most resistance as I dawdle blind. My work-study job, the only one that hires people without federal intervention, is located in a house a spinster left to the school. The interior is as sad as it sounds, though the outside does its best to belie any rumors one might have heard. By the time I leave, it has been full dark for close to five hours and the sky has the over-saturated look of silk just pulled from a vat of dye. Four and half hours under fluorescent bulbs have sparked an appreciation for the intermittent puddlings of lamplight, but still, their blue-white glare buzzes in my eyes and I skirt it through sodden patches of grass. I make it a game, edging as close as possible to the perimeter of light, pretending that I will suffer the same bleached fate as the leaves flattened on the pavement. If the toe of my shoe accidentally trespasses, it doesn’t count, just because. Sometimes I’ll stop to stand under a lamp, one of the orange ones that bleeds auburn into the trees. Under it, everything has a hue that throbs, a ginger pop I can almost taste riding on the wildness of November wind. For a few seconds, I’ll pause, contemplate the leaves limned in titian flush, wait for the cold to push me along, wait for the next autumn sunset to slow me down.
Kenny vs. Spenny is the worst show ever. There’s definitely a level to my sense of humor that would be more appropriate for a 13-year-old boy; I thought the Jackass movies were hysterical and there’s not a whole lot funnier than someone getting whacked in the groin. But my God, this show takes it to a whole new level of disgusting. Tonight is the first night I’ve ever seen the show and I honestly don’t think I could stand to watch it again. The episode I’m currently…enjoying? partaking in…features meat, meat, projectile vomiting, and more meat. Kenny and Spenny are locked in a competition to see who can down the most meat in pounds over the course of a week and the results are tragic. Honestly, it looks like Normandy, what with all the bloody pulp on screen at any given moment. I would have said that the nadir of the show occurred when Kenny dumped a tubful of what looked like giblets and pigs’ feet on top of a sleeping Spenny, but that was soon upstaged by the meat smoothie downed by the certifiably-insane Kenny. That might have been the worst, except that he soon decided to throw up EVERYWHERE. Just….ugh. And then for losing the competition, he had to make out with an old lady. I mean…I don’t even know. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, seeing as how the show is coming from the minds of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, but even South Park doesn’t descend to this level of gross idiocy…much. I think I’ve found my limit, and it happens to be when someone inserts an entire cow tongue into his mouth.
Best. Video. Ever.
Does anyone else hate the new set-up in the Student Center, with the food court and Prof’s Place and all that nonsense? What am I saying; of course you do, because it’s jacked-up. I nearly set my room on fire today and I place the blame squarely on The Nonsense.
“But,” you say, “you’re a college student. The least you should be able to do is work a microwave.” And I can. Like a mofo. I’m the Barefoot Contessa of Soup-At-Hand, the Nigella Lawson of popcorn mini-bags, the Giada De Laurentiis of those white-trash Chef Boyardee ravioli cups. (Eff Rachael Ray, she pisses me off.) I still managed to make my microwave go temporarily blooey.
It really wasn’t my fault, though. Like I said, The Nonsense is totally responsible. I went to the Prof’s Place to grab something, but the touch-screen, one of the convenient two to serve the entire undergraduate population currently residing on campus, was broken. I’m an impatient person, never more so when I haven’t eaten all day (or in the last three hours. I have low blood sugar, shut up. [← That's a lie.]) so I gave up and checked the Pronto, where the line was a gajillion years long (≈), and went to the food court. Where I waited 20 minutes for a sandwich and fries. I mean, honestly, if I’m going to eat something will probably kill me, I don’t want to have time to reconsider.
Anyway, I finally get something to eat and, of course, it was cold, and, of course, walking back to the dorm didn’t help the situation because it was practically sleeting, so everything was frigid by the time I got inside. I figured, chuck it in the microwave, it’ll all be copacetic. I had the foresight to take out the ketchup packets (it would just be foolish to do otherwise), but I figured I’d leave the sandwich in the foil-lined bag because my vast experience with the foodstuffs of the lazy has taught me that sometimes it’s okay to put metal in the microwave. Except when it’s a bag lined with tinfoil, apparently, because three seconds in, the microwave starts sparking and there was an ominous smell of smoke. Recalling some sort of saying about “smoke” and “fire” (the specifics aren’t clear), I pulled the bag out and heroically snuffed the flames that were burning merrily on the corner of the sandwich bag. Fear not! The sandwich was fine and displayed its gratitude by promptly becoming lunch. The fries were more reluctant, but they have a pack mentality and eventually gave in.
And this wasn’t my fault because if I had been able to go to the Prof’s Place, or the Pronto Fresco, and wasn’t so annoyed that I was all “Whatever! I do what I want! And I want artery-clogging fake food!” then I wouldn’t have gotten cold Chic-Fil-A that I had to set on fire. So, really. It’s pretty clear who’s to blame.
